Ags

The image is purely mono 😀 Good idea about doing a G2V weighting. My wibbly-wobbly mount takes care of dithering all by itself!

It's always done it off and on. But maybe it is worse now, I will need a few more evenings to see.

L for Lens Cap (Remember to Remove)

I don't know... the Raspberry Pi HQ Cam is something I keep coming back to - I suspect it might work quite well with brighter targets, and it would be fun rigging it up with Peltier cooling.

That's a good point. I've seen this malfunction with fresh AA batteries and a SkyWatcher power tank. The power tank is really old now, I need to replace it in any case, so hopefully that is it. Maybe I could even try overvolting it. If smoke starts streaming out of it, at least I have an excuse to buy something new. Maybe this? https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/info/p12444_Bresser-Mobile-Power-Station-100-Watt.html

Seeing is not the only factor. My eyes are full of glutinous floaters, so I can't go smaller than an exit pupil of around 1mm or the planet in question is obscured behind lumps of eye jelly. So in a 150mm scope, I wouldn't go above 150x, maybe 160x.

My AZ-GTi has an annoying habit of spontaneously slewing in a random direction, usually straight up. It doesn't lose alignment during these mad escapades. It seems to happen every couple of minutes if I am pointing in the vicinity of Polaris, less frequently in other parts of the sky. Tell me there is an easy fix! (One that doesn't involve just smashing it with a hammer 😒 ) It is out of warranty by now. To be honest I don't need goto any more, only tracking for unguided photography. I'm thinking of getting a second hand EQ3-2 and putting an RA drive on it. Only drawback is I would rather live without the weight of an EQ mount.

I quite fancy giving this €60 camera a go... 8mm diagonal IMX477 RGB sensor, Python scriptable, runs off a Raspberry Pi, has ASCOM driver and easily modded for cooling. It seems to produce credible results: https://terramex.neocities.org/astro/

I am thinking about getting a color camera to back up my ASI 178 MM. The Svbony SV305 (non-Pro) looks like it might do. I don't need super-high USB 3 speeds for double stars, and shooting all the colors in one go is tempting. But also thinking of getting an EQ mount to replace my recalcitrant AZ-GTi.

I made a simple focus mask with a craft knife and thick cardboard. I think it worked pretty well for a purely guestimated mask 😀 Then I worked on collimation and tried to photograph Albireo, but for some reason the AZ-GTi just wasn't tracking well. I had a go at Polaris instead as that SHOULD have been easy to track but the mount was playing up (panning in random directions spontaneously). I'll have to track down the source of the halo around bright stars.

Happy birthday, and many happy returns of the postperson!

It was a nice scope but I found a local buyer within hours of posting it on te-les-koop.nl. It's been surplus to requirements since I got a C6.

I've used a Skymax 102 and AZ-GTi to observe and image planets. It is a very satisfying combination.

Not if you're in the southern hemisphere.

My aims are mostly aesthetic, but if I can make meaningful measurements I will have a go!

I ran out of box filler... That's from art classes from years ago. It was like art boot camp - I wasn't allowed to use black paint, I had to mix it myself from primary colors 😁

I have a plan to image double stars. It's hard to find good images of these online, and I think my C6 and AZ-GTi could do a good job of it in combination with lucky imaging / lucky tracking techniques. I have yet to make a DSO astrophoto I am entirely pleased with so any tips would be welcome. Of course with doubles star color is absolutely key and I only have a mono ASI178MM and a very cheap set of dichroic RGB filters. My prior experience with these filters is the blue channel is always incredible weak. When imaging planets I set gain for R to 210, raise it to 260 for G and raise it again to 310 for B to get the same brightness - each gain of 50 is linear doubling of the gain. For DSOs the blue channel is frequently unstackable (bear in mind I am using exposures of no more than 10 seconds). So I am thinking of shooting R and G only and making a linear approximation of B (i.e. if R is stronger than G for a star, then B is weaker than G, and vice versa). It might be sacrilege but I am thinking of using a mask to introduce diffraction spikes. Would this offer any advantages in terms of showing star colors? I did a 2 minute test shot of Albireo a few nights ago which serves as a baseline of awfulness on which I hope to improve. In the picture, collimation is off, focus is not 100% (must make a Y mask), there's thin cloud, and som dew on the corrector plate. It's just a couple of minutes of 4 second subs of Albireo (f6.3), and it gives me hope because the setup splits the double easily, surrounding stars are picked up and there's lots of room for improvement.

The Top 200 Doubles list to which I (and no doubt many others) owe a huge debt appears to have gone offline: http://users.compaqnet.be/doublestars/ For those not aware of this brilliant resource, you can still find it on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419055115/http://users.compaqnet.be/doublestars/

Spent 50 cents on a counterweight shaft for my AZT6. I splashed out another 50 cents on a matching Counterweight Bar Locking Ring (for some reason the hardware storekeeper insisted on calling it a "nut"). It was a matching color!

Went back to the Aptoide version and all is good once more.

Maybe the support page Aptoids you if your phone doesn't support the older version.

I did uninstall and installed Pro from your link, but this version has the crash-on-start bug. I will have to go back to the Aptoide version.

Yes i had to install the Aptoides store, but uninstalled that immediately afterwards. The Synscan app doesn't need any scary permissions, so I think I'll leave it. The SkyWatcher support page is still offering me the Aptoides APK.

Maybe it depends on the jurisdiction you are coming from, or which Android device you are using...

Yes that link works for me, but that's not where the support page sent me.... 🤨